Teacher would have helped man who killed him, friends say

One scholarship went to Kendall Cheek, a 23-year-old junior at Metropolitan State College, who, before meeting Michael Leighton, didn’t think she was college material and now dreams of taking his place at the same Aurora alternative school, The Estate.

“I’m following in Mike’s footsteps,” Cheek said. “Mike always looked for the most screwed-up kid to connect with. What’s screwed up is Mike would probably sit down with his killer and try to help him.”

Cheek and Ken Leighton said they would still like to see the person who caused so many people so much pain brought to justice.

“The number one emotion I feel is pure anger,” Cheek said.

On Dec. 19, 2003, the day Michael Leighton died, he spilled some coffee on the passenger seat of his car on his way to school.

Going home that day he stopped at the car wash and was cleaning the stain when a man jumped into the driver’s seat, shot him twice, ran around to the other side of the car and fired two more shots into the 6-foot-4, 260-pound former college football player. The killer didn’t take anything and police speculated it was a gang initiation, Ken Leighton said.

On OCTOBER 22, 2004 Ken Leighton speaks to Smoky Hill High School football players. His son was an assistant football coach for the team before he was killed a year earlier.

A little more than two weeks later, on Jan. 7, 2004, Robert Zamora, 23, shot Denver police officer Kevin Kreuzer in the arm following a police chase on West Colfax Avenue. He abandoned his 2-year-old son in his Ford Mustang and ran. Kreuzer was the only Denver police officer shot that month. Zamora, who had a lengthy criminal record with gang ties, was sentenced to 36 years in prison.

After being disciplined 38 times in his first six years in prison for fights, selling drugs and a litany of other violations, Zamora is at maximum security Colorado State Penitentiary in Cañon City. There he can’t be interviewed and hasn’t responded to a letter from The Post.

Some time later, Ken Leighton asked about the investigation into his son’s murder. An officer decided to tell Leighton that the same gun that killed Michael was used to shoot Kreuzer. But the same officer declined to reveal the shooter’s name, saying only that the guy got 36 years in prison for the officer’s shooting.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.